I normally just ignore as noise the profanity-ridden anti-European clap trap that flows out of the likes of Elai1978, but there is so much BS and bluster on this thread it needs some rebuttal for balance.
It’s a woeful specific output... 100bhp/litre is the absolute minimum I’ll accept in an NA motor with sporting pretentions.
and
It’s just laziness and shit engineering on the part of VW
This and the rest of your postings makes you sound both incredibly immature and one-dimensional, rather like an eight year old boy who has just lost a game of Top Trumps to his little sister, and just plain naive. There are many, many good valid reasons why a manufacturer might not pursue the maximum specific output from their engines in a particular installation.
Some of these will be technical. Back in the late Nineties, BMW offered a 2.0 diesel in the Rover 75, and what appeared to be the same engine with substantially higher outputs in their own vehicles. The reason is that this was the early days of common rail injection systems which were going to become ubiquitous, but the technology was not well-developed so that older distributor pump injection systems could still produce a higher specific output. Therefore, BMW used Rover to develop the common rail technology in service, while initially using the (dirtier) Bosch VP44 pump in the same engine for its own passenger cars, and gradually increased the CR engine's output as technological development allowed. Or it might be that the size and design of the engine bay limits gearbox options - especially so in a transverse-engined front driver.
Another good reason would be to limit the specific output for emissions, tax, or other regulatory reasons: as a general rule Japan has followed California's lead on emissions and has engineered its cars accordingly. Many countries now have emissions-linked taxation for cars which will prompt artificial limits on engine outputs, and several countries also have power-to-weight ratio limits for certain driver's licence categories.
Horsepower and specific output are not the be-all and end-all of driving characteristics either. The Honda S2000 referenced above produces its maximum power at over 8,000 rpm which is fine for blasting along an empty country road with the roof down on a sunny day, or round a race track. In traffic on the Autobahn between Frankfurt and Bremen, or the North Circular on a Friday evening, where most Golfs are likely to be actually used that would get very tiring: a smoother six pot engine which produces its power (and substantially more torque) at lower engine speeds is much more comfortable, usable, and just as fast in the circumstances. It is no secret that VW wanted to make its Golfs appeal to more sophisticated drivers from the mk IV onwards - Elai1978's histrionic reaction to them rather underlines the point.
And finally, of course, there are marketing reasons. The problem VW have would have been differentiating it from other performance cars within the VW group, particularly the Audi RS3 and to avoid cannibalising sales of that car. As for competing with the BMW M3 - why do that with the Golf when you've got the Audi RS4?
It is also high time to shine a spotlight on the BS that is often spouted on reliability, claims which are never, ever referenced.
The two largest owner survey-based vehicle ratings in the UK are the JD Power Dependability Survey, and the AutoExpress Driver Power survey. They produce completely different results. There are other warranty claim based surveys, but these are drawn from much smaller, self-selecting samples.
The Driver Power collates a number of different factors, including reliability as well as owner appeal and satisfaction, into an overall score and ranking for individual cars and for manufacturers. The top five for 2020 are (in order): Lexus, Kia, Subaru, Mazda, and Skoda, ahead of Toyota and Honda at six and seven respectively. Peugeot, Alfa Romeo and Volvo make up the rest of the top 10. Unfortunately I do not know what weighting is applied to reliability in the final result.
The JD Power Dependability survey - well, the clue is in the title. They even quantify the reliability with a figure of problems per 100 cars. The most recent one, 2019, had Peugeot top and Skoda second with 77 and 88 problems per 100 vehicles (pp100) respectively against an industry average of 119 pp100.
If that doesn't leave certain anti-European and anti VW Group posters apopletic and frothing at the mouth, their beloved Honda (109 pp100) only just beat VW (113 pp100) while Toyota was way back in 18th place with 134 pp100. That's not only below the industry average and all parts of the VW Group except Audi, but also below Renault, Citroën, and Dacia.
Maybe the terrible reputations of the French is the real myth here?